Augmented Three-Phase AC-Railgun: Basic Considerations

This article describes a new method to operate an augmented three-phase rail launcher. The idea to use multiphase alternating current rather than direct current to drive the rail launcher has been brought up by Murthy and Weldon in 1993 and initialized these investigations. This article is part of a series of publications dealing with this topic in the context of a Ph.D. project. One benefit of this arrangement is the inherent generation of a constant propelling force, which is otherwise only possible with direct current drives. However, in comparison to conventional dc railguns, the whole system has to be redesigned. The setup is more complex because three rather than only one pair of rails are required and an appropriate power supply has to be setup. Compared to dc-driven rail launchers, this type of accelerator has to be calculated with a different theoretical approach. The respective theory and its outcome with respect to a realized experimental accelerator described in ZEL 2022 are explained in detail.